Tag Archives: liability

For the time, I am immersing myself in crafting thrillers, although fantasy keeps rearing its head, beckoning me to return because in so many ways it is less demanding. First and foremost, fantasy requires little if any research. Even more important, it poses no liability issues. From the outset, it is obvious the characters and settings are entirely fictitious. Not so with thrillers.

This genre’s readers demand realism. The stories must be believable—the more so the better. They must be set in the real world in recognizable places, must pose real issues, realistic threats, and be populated with flesh and blood characters you might yet meet if you haven’t already. Herein lies the crux of the inherent problem.

While the city and State the story occurs in may be real and cited by name, naming actual businesses or recognizable privately-owned locations, especially in a context where bad things happen, can have real legal consequences. Consequently, when I set off a dirty bomb in a major sports venue, I had to take care to give the teams different names from the real ones, but similar enough the reader can identify with them. And while the stadium remains unnamed, the city makes it immediately recognizable. Fortunately, because I set my story in the future, I can argue that the home team, the visiting team and stadium’s ownership as well as team composition have changed by that time. They are certainly not the ones that currently exist. In fact, upon publication the book will undoubtedly have to be prefaced with appropriate legal disclaimers acknowledging the fictitious nature of the work and stating any resemblance to actual places or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.